December 2023 News: Counterpoint Research, a market research agency, released a report on the global smartphone application processor (AP) market in the third quarter of this year. Overall, the industry landscape has not changed much.
JLQ (0.2%), which ranks seventh in terms of shipments, was jointly funded and established in May 2017 by Qualcomm China, Lianxin Technology, a subsidiary of Datang Telecom, Wise Road Capital, and Jianguang Assets, and later Xiaomi Yangtze River Industry Fund also became a shareholder. In June last year, the first smartphone SoC "JR510" was launched, using Samsung's 11nm FinFET process as a whole, with imaging and AI processing and other performance, this 4G chip was first equipped with Xiaomi's brand POCO C40 (for overseas markets, in Europe, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, Indonesia and other dozens of countries and regions on a large scale).
Samsung (5%) and Google (1%) ranked fifth and sixth, respectively. The former has a self-developed chip Exynos, but in recent years, it has been dragged down by its own semiconductor process and has suffered many bad reviews, so that the flagship mobile phone Galaxy S23 series is equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. However, it is reported that the Galaxy S24 series released in January next year will revert to the dual-processor strategy, and some markets such as South Korea and Europe will be equipped with the Exynos 2400. A follow-up product, the Exynos 2500, is already in development and is expected to go into mass production in the second half of next year.
Google's self-developed chip has been updated to the third generation, the Tensor G3 is based on Samsung's 4nm process, adopts a 9-core design, and the AI performance (that is, the number of machine Xi models running on the device) is twice that of the first generation, and it is first installed on the new generation of Pixel 8 series phones.
UNISOC ranked fourth with a market share of 13%, down 2 percentage points from the second quarter. This is currently the only 5G chip supplier in the open market in Chinese mainland, and the second-generation 5G chip T760/T770 was mass-produced and shipped last year, which has been adopted by ZTE, Nubia, China Telecom, Hisense and other brand mobile phones and sold in the global market. With the increasing penetration of entry-level 5G smartphones in regions such as Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa, and Europe, UNISOC is expected to gain a certain market share in these regions.
In third place was Apple, with an 18% market share, down 1 percentage point from the second quarter. The biggest highlight of the iPhone 15 Pro launched in September this year is the A17 Pro, which is the world's first chip based on TSMC's 3nm process, with 19 billion transistors, an increase of 3 billion compared to the previous generation A16. It adopts a configuration of 6CPU+6GPU, and supports hardware-level ray tracing and MetalFX (Apple's fast graphics rendering technology for games) upgrades for the first time.
Qualcomm came in second with a market share of 28%, down 1 percentage point from the second quarter. In the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2023 ended September 24 (roughly the third quarter of the calendar year), the company achieved revenue of US$8.631 billion and net profit of US$1.489 billion, down 24% and 48% year-on-year, respectively, of which the revenue of the mobile phone segment decreased 27% year-on-year to US$5.45 billion.
At the 2023 Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm released the Snapdragon 8 Gen3, a smartphone chip platform that supports a large model with up to 10 billion parameters, which is based on TSMC's 4nm process, which improves performance by 30% and power efficiency by 20% compared with the previous generation. In the past month, mobile phones equipped with this chip have begun to be launched in batches, such as Xiaomi 14, Redmi K70, OnePlus 12, iQOO12, Realme GT 5 Pro, Meizu 21, and many more.
MediaTek surpassed Qualcomm to become the global smartphone processor shipment champion for the first time since the third quarter of 2020, and has maintained the first place for 13 consecutive quarters, with a shipment share of 33% in the third quarter of this year, an increase of 3 percentage points from the second quarter. This was mainly due to the growth of shipments of low-to-mid-range smartphones, which led to shipments of the Dimensity 7000 series.
Since the beginning of this year, MediaTek has released a variety of chips such as Dimensity 9300 and Dimensity 8300, achieving full coverage of products at different levels. Among them, the flagship product Dimensity 9300 is its first "4+4" all-large core architecture smartphone chip, and it is also the industry's first smartphone chip equipped with a hardware-generated AI engine, which can support terminals to run AI large language models with 1 billion, 7 billion, 13 billion, and up to 33 billion parameters.
Although MediaTek continues to make efforts in the high-end market, its products are still mainly in the middle and low end, and the gross profit margin is low, which is also reflected in the revenue share of global smartphone application processors. Its revenue share is only 15%, behind Qualcomm (40%) and Apple (31%), in third place.
Write at the end
With the strong sales of the Mate 60 series and Mate X5 powered by the Kirin 9000S processor, Huawei HiSilicon returned to fifth place in the global smartphone application processor revenue share in the third quarter, accounting for 3%. If nothing else, the next low-end models such as the nova series and the Changxiang series will gradually switch to the new Kirin, and its market share is expected to further increase.